Mandy de Wilde

I have worked at the Anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam where I explored waste and how it is valued in different settings such as households, cities, and markets.

Take as an example organic waste. In practice, organic waste is not without value but valued and thereby transformed, in diverse ways: as fertiliser in households, as food for rats and birds in cities, or as a commodity in the circular economy. As waste is valued differently in different situations, the humans involved engage in different ways with soils, animals, and microbes. Simultaneously, sustainability, as a value-in-the-making, takes diverse shapes, and gives rise to new, more or less equal, relations between humans and nonhumans, and among humans.

Or take plastic. In the interest of sustainability some high-income countries have contracts with low-income countries to process their plastic in a supposedly sustainable manner. This means that plastic in the Netherlands is bundled in bales, and then travels around the world on shipping containers, ending up in Turkey, Vietnam, or Ethiopia. There it might be further recycled by companies and waste workers, it may end up in a landfill, or might be burned on site. Still leading to environmental pollution. Plastic thus becomes embedded in transnational economic relations and the commodification of waste may generate new inequalities between countries in the Global North and Global South, or reproduce old ones.